“Not just human. Petit bourgeois, which is worse,” Dmitri said. Then to Ellen: “You are some sort of Slav, girl?”
“I… Polish, German, some Scots-Irish, a little Cherokee, sir,” Ellen replied.
“And she has the most intriguingly complex psyche, too,” Adrienne said. “Childhood trauma, I think. Odd pleasure-pain links.”
He replied in Russian, and probably to her. Ellen searched her memory and managed to produce what she thought was a polite disclaimer of ability to speak the language, learned when they had some clients from St. Petersburg: “Ya poka ne govoryu po russki, Gospodin.”
“I said, You have nice tits, too, to go with the psyche,” he replied with a smile.
What the hell am I supposed to say to that? she wondered, feeling her throat lock on the words. Fuck off, you posturing moron? Oh, Christ! I can’t even think it! Or bite me, maybe?
Adrienne sighed. “Dmitri, your lucies have tits. Or even boobs. Mine have breasts. Or at least the females do.”
“What happened to the Chinese boy with the delectable arse, then?”
“Still delectable, useful in several ways, and currently resting after-”
Adrienne turned her head and snapped aside just short of Ellen’s thigh, a biting gesture with an audible click of white sharp teeth.
Dmitri snorted. “What a collector you are! Don’t you ever just kill them, Adrienne? It’s like endless foreplay with no fucking!”
Ellen swallowed. She thought the boy holding the tray did too, with an almost imperceptible quiver in his hands.
Adrienne sighed again. “Dmitri, Dmitri, what a… gourmand you are. I suppose you even like b?chamel sauce.”
“What’s wrong with it?”
“That it makes everything taste the same, Escoffier’s original sin? There’s nothing wrong with agony and death, but you miss out on so much if you hurry, experiencing the direct mental overtones as well as the actual blood. Emotional degradation, despair, self-loathing, transference…”
He snorted. “Girlie stuff.”
“Dmitri, I am a girl! When I’m corporeal, at least, and most of the time night-walking too.”
“Quantity can have a quality all its own, even for drinking emotions. In mass, they can be overwhelmingly potent. Ah, if you had only been at Srebrenica when the massacre began-”
“Dmitri, I was a child. Besides, my old, do you realize how many times you’ve told your Srebrenica story?”
“Oh.” He winced. “Tell me I’m not as bad as von Horst with the Hindenberg.”
“Nearly as bad as McFadden with the Titanic! And he’s transitioned successfully to postcorporeal so he’ll never shut up. You’d think with a potentially infinite span ahead of him he’d focus on the future sometimes.”
They laughed again. Adrienne touched the controls.
“I’ll do what I can with T?kairin Hajime,” Adrienne said. “He has not any dog in this fight, so he may be reasonable. Michiko listens to me, and she has his ear. She’s of our generation. You’ve earned release, Dmitri. There’s definitely going to be a meeting in Tiflis next year, the full Council and all candidate-qualified purebloods. They have to elect a successor to Gheorghe, after all.”
“I shall be forever in your debt. And the more so if I can get to Tiflis and a decent climate. We will have to remind Putin of who he really works for, so there are no disturbances.”
“Good. There’s talk that they may select a corporeal this time, which would be the first since… when? 1932, I think.”
“Ah. A younger voice on the Council. That would be… progressive.”
“Yes, it would. Possibilities, eh?”
The screen died and hummed upward. Adrienne smiled like a lynx. “That went smoothly, very smoothly. Theresa, you’ve earned a visit to Jean-Charles.”
Ellen cleared her throat.
“Yes, yes, ch?rie,” Adrienne said. “Get dressed, and let Theresa have her pendant back. You did very well, putting Dmitri in a good mood. Yes, dangled in front of him like a piece of steak is one way to put it, and no doubt you’ll feel better with… what’s that thought there? Without my ass bare to the breeze? We’ll be landing soon, anyway.”
She smiled and linked her hands behind her head.
“Life is good.”
CHAPTER SIX
Where am I? Ellen Tarnowski looked around. She was sitting in… It’s Adrian’s living-room!
The great windows showing an endless tumbled stretch of moonlit high desert and mountain, the lights dim, a fire of pi?on logs crackling on the fieldstone hearth and scenting the air. Even the faint smell of tobacco she’d found so irritating was comforting enough to make her almost sob with gratitude.
And Adrian, standing gravely by the mantelpiece, taut and elegant as a cat.
“Oh, thank God!” she burst out. “Adrian, I had the most horrible-”
Full wakefulness crashed back. “It wasn’t a dream, was it?”
He shook his head, the silky hair sliding around his lobeless ears.
“I’m afraid not,” he said softly, his face stark with misery. “I’m sorry, Ellie. I am so very sorry.”
“Then-”
She looked down; she was in a long denim skirt and Indian blouse outfit she remembered. She pinched herself, hard. It hurt, but her surroundings stayed just the same. She had never had a dream like this, not complete with every detail of all five senses.
“Where am I?” she said slowly.
“Your… mind is here.”
“Where’s here, Adrian?”
He hesitated. “This is my memory palace. We’re inside… ummm, my mind. I’m on a flight to San Francisco, trying to find you.”
Ellen put a hand to her forehead and clenched it until the fingers dug painfully into the skin.
“And you never thought to tell me any of this before?” she said, keeping her voice from rising dangerously. “We were sleeping together for six months and it just never seemed the right fucking time? No wonder I knew you were lying to me!”
He crossed and knelt before her, taking her hands. “Ellie, I wanted to tell you. But this is dangerous, dangerous stuff, and I was trying to keep you as safe as I could.”
“Keeping me ignorant is not protective! From now on, you will tell me things or I will not… not speak to you at all!”
“I feel guilty as hell that I let us get involved at all, but it had been years, I was supposed to be left alone-Ellie, we don’t have time for me to tell you two hundred years of history. Multi-millennia, some of it. I need you to help me, and I promise I’ll make it as right as I can. Whatever it takes.”
She took a long deep breath and forced a degree of calm on herself. Her fingers closed around his with a strength bred from years of tennis.
“My mind is here? Where’s the rest of me?”
“Where… you were before you went to sleep.”
“I’m still in bed with your crazy vampire sister?” she half-screamed. “Get me out, get me out, get me out, Oh, God, the things she did to me-”
Air gasped into her lungs and she forced control on herself and choked down sobs.
“My mind is here? Literally?”
He nodded. “I’ve got your genetic template already loaded. I’m… running you on my hardware. Wetware. Your body is in trance state, like mine-but it’s, ummm, empty.”
